Acting and the intellect
It is not only okay for an actor to be smart. It is vital to cultivate your intelligence. You can have a strong connection to your intellect and also be spontaneous, imaginative, emotionally available, and deeply engaged with the other actors. These capacities can work together.
Yet performers are still given instructions such as “You're too smart,” “Get out of your head,” or “Stop thinking.” Sometimes a teacher intends something useful: stop monitoring every moment, stop anticipating the result, or pay attention to your partner. But the instruction does not necessarily tell the actor how to do any of that. Taken literally, it can make intelligence itself seem like the problem.
An actor who is already struggling may add another task: monitor yourself to make sure you are not thinking. The instruction becomes one more thing to think about.
Say what you mean, and teach what to do
Some performers find “in the moment” or “out of your head” useful. Familiar shorthand can help when a teacher and actor share a precise understanding. The question is whether it actually helps this actor with this problem. If it creates confusion, a teacher needs a more specific instruction.
Is the actor planning a vocal result instead of responding to the other person? Trying to remember the next line? Lacking a vivid imaginary place? Unsure what the character wants? Working with unnecessary physical tension? Afraid to allow a surprising impulse? These are different problems. They do not all need the same remedy.
Teach the actor what to do with the imagination, attention, voice, and body. Demonstrate a process. Let the actor try it. Notice what changes. An exercise should give the performer an experience they can investigate and eventually reproduce for themselves.
The purpose of a teaching vocabulary is to make the work more accessible. If the vocabulary leaves the actor ashamed and no better equipped, the teacher has more work to do.
Give the instrument a foundation
For many beginning actors, and for experienced performers who have become restricted, I put early emphasis on experiential work: developing emotional, vocal, physical, and imaginative availability. Before asking someone to polish a result, find out whether the instrument can participate freely enough to create it.
This is why a curriculum that begins and ends with intellectual script analysis can leave important needs untouched. An actor may explain a scene beautifully and still have difficulty responding through the voice, body, or imagination. Knowing what a moment means and having a process for living it are related accomplishments, but one does not automatically provide the other.
Build that experiential foundation, then deepen and integrate the work of analysis. Train critical thinking. Read widely. Study the world in which a story takes place. Learn psychology that helps you recognize relationships, conflicting values, and different ways of organizing experience. Bring precise attention to language.
The aim is an actor with access to many capacities: intellect, sensation, imagination, emotional life, physical and vocal range, and the ability to respond to another person. No single capacity should have to do the entire job.
Remember that you are making a performance
“Be in the moment” can become especially confusing when it suggests that you should forget you are acting. Please remember that you are acting. If we are performing a scene involving a killer, your imaginative involvement must coexist with the knowledge that your partner is a colleague and that the physical actions are agreed choreography.
Professional work includes practical awareness. You may need to repeat blocking, maintain a camera relationship, observe a cue, or change a choice after a direction. None of this automatically destroys your imaginative life. The work is to develop enough skill that those responsibilities can coexist with responsiveness and discovery.
An actor can know where the scene is going and still receive what the other actor actually does. Preparation does not have to dictate every sensation. A choice can be specific without becoming a rigid command that nothing new may happen.
The vocabulary I want is concrete enough to teach that complexity. “Listen to what changes in your partner's voice” gives you something to explore. “Try the line while protecting this image” gives you an experiment. Afterward, you can decide whether it helped. “Stop having a head” does not give you a comparable process.
Artists have a right to think about the world
There is also a cultural prejudice worth challenging: the notion that an actor should entertain people and otherwise keep quiet. “They're just actors. What do they know?” is a way of dismissing a person before considering what they have said. Being an actor does not make your political views correct. It does not disqualify you from developing and expressing informed views, either.
The history of the Hollywood blacklist makes the stakes of political intimidation concrete. In 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities called film professionals to testify about communist influence. The Hollywood Ten were cited and imprisoned for contempt of Congress, and major studios instituted a blacklist that damaged careers. In 1952, official action questioning Charlie Chaplin's readmission to the United States was serious enough to be discussed in the British Parliament.
That history does not establish where an acting-class phrase originated. It does show why the intellectual and political independence of artists matters. We should be able to study ideas, examine power, disagree, and take responsibility for what we say. A teaching culture can encourage that independence.
The actor I want to help develop is informed, self-aware, emotionally available, physically and vocally responsive, and capable of being with the other actors.
Jason Bennett, Are the Best Actors Dummies?, original article.
Intelligence and imaginative freedom belong in the same training
The actor I want to help develop is informed, self-aware, emotionally available, physically and vocally responsive, and capable of being with the other actors. The training should cultivate all of that. It should also lead to detailed text work: line by line, thought by thought, relationship by relationship.
You can study a character's worldview and then discover that a movement or dream image opens something your first analysis missed. You can explore a scene physically and then return to the writing to test whether the discovery serves the story. The different tools can illuminate one another.
There is room here for discipline and for mystery. An actor may describe a performance as effortless, surprising, or as though the work were flowing through them. Such experiences do not require a rule that thought must disappear. Nor does the absence of a magical feeling mean that an actor has failed to do meaningful work.
Develop your knowledge. Deepen your imaginative life. Learn specific processes. Then practice bringing them together until you have more room to respond.
Intelligence should expand an actor's freedom. A useful education helps make that possible.
